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The 6 step breakdown to getting your first 1000 users.
Here is a 6 minute break down as to how you as a founder can best align yourself with navigating your specific market and obtaining all relevant points to help accelerate to reaching the point of 1k DAU.
1. Start with one painfully specific person
Your first 1,000 users don’t come from “the market.” They come from one clear type of human with a clear pain. Before Amazon was Amazon, Jeff Bezos obsessed over online book buyers because they were underserved and easy to reach. Narrow beats broad every time. If you can’t describe your ideal first user in one sentence, you’re not ready to scale.
2. Build something slightly embarrassing
Your first version should feel uncomfortably small. Brian Chesky and his co-founders manually took photos of hosts’ apartments because that’s what the product needed to work. Early traction is less about polish and more about removing friction, sometimes manually. If your product doesn’t solve a real problem yet, no amount of growth hacks will save it.
3. Do things that don’t scale
This is where founders separate themselves from marketers. DM people. Cold email thoughtfully. Sit in forums. Personally onboard users. Paul Graham famously pushed founders to do exactly this because early growth is about learning, not efficiency. Every 1:1 interaction sharpens your product and your message.
4. Borrow distribution before you earn it
Your product doesn’t need virality, it needs proximity. Find where your users already hang out and show up there with value. Newsletters, Slack groups, Reddit, Twitter, niche communities, marketplaces. The fastest way to 1,000 users is riding existing trust instead of trying to manufacture your own from scratch.
5. Turn early users into proof
Once a few people love your product, capture it. Screenshots. Testimonials. Short quotes. Case studies. Early users don’t just validate your idea, they lower the trust barrier for the next wave. People join products that feel alive. Momentum compounds faster than features.
6. Obsess over retention, not growth
If users don’t stick, growth is just noise. Ask why people churn. Fix onboarding. Improve the first 5 minutes of the experience. The founders who win early are the ones who make users feel like the product was built for them. Retention is the quiet engine behind every great growth story.
TL;DR
TL;DR — How founders get their first 1,000 users
Go narrow first: Pick one specific user with one painful problem. Broad ideas don’t convert early.
Ship scrappy: An imperfect product that solves a real problem beats a polished one that doesn’t.
Do unscalable work: DM, email, onboard, and talk to users one by one, this is where learning happens.
Leverage existing distribution: Show up where your users already are instead of building an audience from zero.
Use early users as proof: Testimonials, screenshots, and stories reduce trust friction for the next users.
Retention > growth: If users don’t stick, growth is fake. Fix onboarding and the first experience first.
Bottom line: The first 1,000 users come from focus, hustle, and care—not hacks.